You know, I was going to say that you're a better Christian than I am, being able to forgive me after how roughly I've handled our relations. You're right, I've been different the last few months. I've been very frustated with my life, and been dealing with a lot of depression, and a lot of things have been making me very angry lately.

Anyway, I'm sorry about all this. I've been looking for a fight lately, and I should know better than to do so, and so should you. Don't let your anger towards me spread towards the rest of our members. It's not their fault.

I suggest we make a truce. No more insults, from either side. Up to you though.

I am a flawed man with my limits and I have been attacked form all side (not just on these forums). My apologies for my language.

I'll probably leave these forums as they bring out the worst in me.

Don't sweat it. We each have our flaws and exhibit anger from time to time after all. We might piss each other off every now and again, but each of us is here because we enjoy computers, programming, and games. We're all buddies in the end, right? So you don't have to leave these forums.

-----sig:“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

I will accept responsibility. It was absolutely all my fault. I should never have posted a word in these forums.

Oh, grow a fucking backbone, stand up for yourself (and your wife), and keep on fucking going. Nobody is perfect. Fuck, both of you in this damn fight are delusional (obviously, you believe in a magician in the sky)! And that's OK! You can believe in different things, I can believe in different things (or nothing), and we can all still get along just fine, even if some of you are angry about others of us not believing in the same stuff.

The secret ingredient is smiling and letting go of your pride. Ultimately, it's not up to you which one of us (or anybody else) is correct. That has already been decided by the universe or by "god" or by whatever. Either you're right, and you can be smug about it, or you're wrong, and being smug will make you look stupid (though even if you're right you'd look stupid because there's no way of proving you're right). If you're right though, and obviously you think you are, then you don't need to get offended when somebody else expresses an opposing view point. I mean, because, you're right. And if you're wrong, which certainly you can't be because you're a genius, then you have nothing to lose by learning that you're wrong from somebody else because you'll ultimately be better off being more correct in the future. The only reason to possibly be butthurt is closed-mindedness and ego. Neither one looks good on you.

Effectively, this thread has turned into a demonstration of how unstable Christianity is, and how being an atheist is the key to happiness. Grow a pair, open your mind, and hold yourself up for fucks sake. None of this is any reason to tuck your wiener between your legs and bend over. If you're right then stand up for yourself. And if you're wrong (I mean, if you realize you're wrong) then learn from it and improve yourself. Jesus Christ.

Yes, I am Neil. I started in these forums using my alias as most people do and with another avatar which will no longer work (animated GIF). And I decided to go back to that and change a few things up.

I used to use this alias "Night Hacker" on BBSes back before the internet existed, shortened to the 9 character limit for BBSes and even things like IRCs and the like back in the day. I can't change my alias on here that I can see, so I just clicked the box to use my alias instead (in your Control center for these forums).

I had forgotten there was an option for using your alias. I did remember that there was some abuse of the name and avatar change facility, involving the name "lameDuck" <3, and Matthew changed it so you have to contact him if you want a name change. I certainly didn't mind being stuck on Bruce Perry when that happened (I wanted to be another Chris Barry or Steve Terry).

I was looking for a tiny flashlight I had and it dawned on me, I had left it inside my computer over a day ago after working on it; and it was still on! It was a little dim today. Not the dumbest thing I have ever done.

User interfaces are my least favorite thing. Similar to art (and sound), I'm hopeless at it. I absolutely hate trying to maintain the layout of things on a screen. I much prefer letting software do the layout. It can do a much better job than I can.

If I had the energy to do it I would develop a library whose purpose is to just take a data model (with annotations where required) and output a fully dynamic UI to view or manage it. It's pretty absurd how much time any of us can spend in a year just hand coding what the computer could be taught to do by itself. It's not particularly interesting in most cases. In most cases, we need "function" over form, and where form matters we can always use annotations/hints to guide the software to get it right, and where extreme measures are necessary override the process with custom code. In any case, there should always just be an "easy" method call to "just do it" and make it functional in 5 seconds instead of 3 hours.

The same is also true of output documentation (e.g., printing). We should have a library that can just take some data and text templates and just output something that will render "nicely" on a page. To some extent, I think that this exists through the LaTeX software packages, but it's non-trivial to interface with and most of the world is ignorant of its existence at all.

Still messing around with 3D Terrain. This is a total remake of an old project, which I may end up totally remaking again with more modern opengl or I will go back to 2D games which are less likely to make my head explode.

Yeah, it has ground collision, and it was easier to implement than I originally thought it would. If you look at the screenshot it has an "On Ground" indicator. You can fly around and if you collide with the ground and just move forward or something it will follow the ground terrain until you purposely fly off of it.

Here's the code to detect the ground. My terrain is divided up into "cells", square areas containing two polygons each. Both polygons use the same upper right vertex as the first vertex. The size of the cell/polygons is determined by how much I scale the terrain.

#SelectExpand

1// cx & cz = terrain cell we are in 2cx = tx / terrain.Scale; 3cz = tz / terrain.Scale; 4 5// A simple method to determine which polygon we're over 6int px =(GLint)tx % terrain.Scale;// X position within the cell 7int pz =(GLint)tz % terrain.Scale;// Z position within the cell 8if(px > pz) side =true;// if px>pz we're in the right polygon 9else side =false;// otherwise left polygon, yes, that's it! 10 11int CurrFace =(cz *(terrain.Size-1)+ cx)*2+ side;// Which polygon are we over 12int v0 = terrain.Faces[CurrFace].vert_indices[0];// Get the first vertex index of this polygon 13 14// Calculate position inside polygon and height of at that point. 15float dx = tx - terrain.Vertices[v0].x;// Calculate the length of the x & z vector from 16float dz = tz - terrain.Vertices[v0].z;// the first vertice to our position on the polygon. 17vec3 N = terrain.Faces[CurrFace].surface_normal;// Get the normal of this polygon face. 18 19/// This is meat of this, it calculates the height within the polygon using it's normal to determine the height between vertices 20float dy = terrain.Vertices[v0].y +(N.x * dx + N.z * dz)/-N.y;// Calculate the height of our position. 21 22float minHeight = dy + walkHeight;// Set our height to the current position within the polygon plus walk height.

I was quite proud of this as it worked the first time I implemented it. of course, I spent lots of time understanding how this works ahead of time, which helped.

-----sig:“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin